Cardinal Divide

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Cardinal Divide Page 29

by Nina Newington


  Doug nods but he doesn’t say anything. Buildings appear on either side of the highway, then a traffic light. Lovely downtown Hinton.

  “Want a coffee?” I ask. “Lunch?”

  “No. You?”

  “I’d just as soon wait until we get to Cardomin. If you think the store will be open.”

  “Long as the mine is running, Hubert’s open. He’s been trying to sell the store for years but it’s hard to imagine him anywhere else.”

  We turn off the Yellowhead onto Highway 40 which, unlike the other roads we could have taken, is paved almost all the way.

  “What you were saying,” Doug looks across at me, “about people trying to figure out if you’re Native or not. Maybe it’s good for people to be unsure. It’s kind of the same if someone’s gay. If it’s obvious—like Geoffrey, like my brother ...”

  “Your brother’s gay?”

  “Was.”

  He’s got the same look he had after the two spirit talk. I wait.

  Eventually he says, “He killed himself.” His eyes are on the road. “He was nineteen years old. Last time I saw him alive he was seventeen. Very flamboyant. He got beat up a lot. I told him maybe he should tone it down. Dress normal when he was on the street. I remember the look on his face, like I’d just punched him. He counted on me to be on his side. To understand. To love him the way he was. And I told him to hide. Like he should be ashamed.”

  “Jesus Doug, you were young too.”

  “Five years older than him.” He glances at me. “I was scared, scared he was going to get killed. I could have come home, looked out for him. But I didn’t want to. I was having too good a time getting high. Then someone brought a letter from my father. Mailed a month earlier to the last address he had for me. Bernard slit his wrists in the bathtub of the apartment he was sharing with two other kids. It was too late when they found him.”

  “Oh God, Doug.”

  “I was outside. It was July. Sun beating down on my head. I stood there reading that letter. Hung over. My hand was shaking. I wanted a joint. That was the first thing I thought of. My brother killed himself and I wanted a joint. I saw what I was. I remembered what I’d told him. His face. I couldn’t imagine how to live with that. But I knew I couldn’t get high any more. Or drink.”

  He shrugs, looks at me. “I came home. Moved back in with my folks. Kept my mother company. All my father did was work and watch TV. My mother went to church, cleaned house. She was dying inside. Fucking priest refused to bury him in the cemetery. A faggot who killed himself. Christ I came to hate the church. But it was all my mother had.

  “I was going crazy. I was so angry. At the church, the world, my brother, myself. I started carrying a knife. Mr. Peaceful Hippie. Hung out where the gay kids were. Like I had some superhero fantasy I was going to spring to their defense. Course nobody knew what the fuck I was doing hanging around there. I looked like a psycho. Which I was. I’d been white-knuckling it for three years.

  “There was a defrocked priest who worked with the street kids. Big old Irishman with a broken nose. Pat was his name. They kicked him out of the priesthood when they discovered him and his housekeeper had five kids. That was back in County Cork. Anyway, he sat me down one day, made me talk to him. He wasn’t a guy you argued with. That night he took me to a meeting.

  “He was my sponsor until he died twelve years ago. My father died a year before Pat. My mother went a few months after.”

  “Christ, Doug.”

  “I started going to the Tuesday meetings at Dreamcatcher. Did some sweats. Connected with some Métis people. It still wasn’t doing it for me. I was pretty much flapping in the breeze. So I decided to do a vision quest. There were new age outfits in the U.S. taking groups out into the desert, leaving them to fast for three days by themselves, praying for a vision. The Sioux were complaining about cultural appropriation which was fair enough but it still sounded like something I needed to do.

  “Right around then a guy in a hardware store told me about this ATV trip he’d taken along the sub-continental divide. He told me how, on one side of the divide, all the rivers drain into the Arctic ocean. On the other they end up in the Atlantic, via Hudson’s Bay. That’s how I came here for the first time.” He points his lips at the road ahead. “It seemed as good a place as any. And it was. I didn’t have any big vision but all the bits of myself that were swirling around began to come together. I couldn’t see the shape but I could feel it happening. If that makes sense?” He looks at me.

  I nod.

  “Pretty soon after that I took a labourer’s job up by Fort Mac. I saw what a few men with big machines can do to the land. Tailing ponds the size of a small town. Right on the Athabasca river. You could see an oily sheen on the river some days. Naturally occurring bitumen, according to the company geologists. Which could have been true but there was no way to tell because they weren’t monitoring the river. Syncrude wasn’t, the province wasn’t and the feds sure as shit weren’t. So it was whatever the company said. But the people on the reserve downstream, they saw changes in the fish and the animals.

  “I worked there on and off a couple of years. Whenever I was home I’d come up here, hike along the Divide. Just the wind and birds. Then one day there was another pick-up truck in the parking lot, guy sitting staring out the windshield. I saw his face. He looked like somebody had died. Then he saw me. Got out of his truck, walked over to me.

  “‘You like this place?’

  “I nodded.

  “‘See that valley over there?’ He pointed off to the north-east. ‘They’re going to dynamite that.’

  “‘Who is?’

  “‘Cardinal River Coals. They’ve got a lease to the whole valley. Twenty three kilometers long, three and a half wide. They’re going to blast off the cap rock, dump all the rubble in the stream beds and valley bottoms. Then they’ll dig twenty six pits. Haul out the coal, ship it to Asia.’

  “We stood there looking out at the valley. After a while I said, ‘I can’t let that happen.’

  “He looked at me for a minute then he said, ‘Okay. I know some people we should talk to.’”

  Chapter Sixty Six

  “LONG STORY SHORT, I got pretty involved. That was around the time Tanya and I got together. I couldn’t go up to Fort Mac anymore. Came to work at Dreamcatcher for a while. Tanya too. We weren’t making any money but it was good work.”

  We’re passing the Luscar mine. The land looks oddly abstract. Smooth snow-covered cones. Too smooth. Spoil piles pretending to be hills. A sign announces reclamation. At the turn off to Cadomin there are more new signs, one to Mountain Park Ghost Town, the other to the Whitehorse Wildland Provincial Park.

  “Since when has there been a park here?”

  “Our big victory. Three years ago.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Except we got word two weeks ago the mining company’s making a deal with the province. They’re going to bypass the whole Environmental Impact Assessment.” Doug pulls up in front of the general store.

  A bell tings as we push open the door. An old wooden counter on the right fronts racks of cigarettes, fishing flies and tackle, knives, ammunition. On the counter are bags of homemade fudge, postcards of trout and grizzlies. The floor space is filled with ranks of shelves: some lined with cans of beef stew and evaporated milk, boxes of mac and cheese and hamburger helper; others with gear and supplies for ATVs.

  The walls haven’t changed either except maybe the quilt of clippings and letters and photos is thicker. The guy who runs the store has shrunk. Shrunk in height but also his face has shrunk into itself, like a mushroom collapsing. Deliquescing. One of Dad’s words. Doug’s leaning against the counter, chatting to the owner. They look my way. I go over and Doug introduces us.

  “Seen you before,” Hubert says, eyes glinting out of the creased skin. “Not in a while though.”

  “I used to come in here with my parents. Ben and Polly Coop-worth.”

  He nods. “Ho
w’s old Ben doing? I was right sorry to hear Polly passed away.”

  Of course he’d be an avid reader of obituaries. “Dad’s very well.” I don’t want to be the one to ask about Daniel Laboucan.

  Doug’s looking at me. He raises an eyebrow. I nod.

  “Hubert,” he says, “you don’t happen to remember a fellow who worked in the mine when it first opened?”

  “I remember all them fellows. What was his name?”

  “Daniel Laboucan.”

  Hubert’s brow furrows, creases growing creases. He’s about to shake his head when he clicks his fingers. “Native fellow? Only there a month or two.” He mimes lifting a bottle to his lips. “Always the trouble, eh?”

  Doug and I look at each other but Hubert’s already off his stool, headed down to the far end of the counter. He lifts a short stepladder off a spike in the wall and sets it up.

  He’s on the top step, one hand braced against the wall, squinting up when we reach him. “Damn walls are growing,” he says. He looks at Doug. “You’ll be able to see.” He points at a yellowed clipping. A photograph of a double line of men facing forward.

  Doug gets up on the ladder. He leans back to read the caption then leans in again.

  “Second from the left, back row,” he says.

  Standing on the top step, staring up, I can’t read the caption but I can see the dark-haired man, his roundish face, straight nose, eyes slightly too far apart. The men to either side look sombre and determined. He looks startled. I glance along the rows. No other obviously Native men. And no women, of course. This could be my father. My biological father. I climb down off the ladder. Doug and Hubert are back chatting by the cash register. I wander further along down the aisle. Stop at the article about the white man who staked his claim to this land after a Native woman told him about ‘the rock that burns.’

  “Meg?”

  I jump.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. What do you want in the way of a sandwich?”

  “Liverwurst with mustard, onions and pickles. On a roll.”

  He’s grinning.

  “What?”

  “Guess what I just ordered for myself? My clean eating friends cringe.”

  “Dad and I always ordered it. Mum couldn’t stand the smell of liver in the house.”

  “Hubert says the road’s still clear up to the Divide. Want to eat up there?”

  “Yes but, if I’m going to do the occasion justice, I need potato chips and an iced tea.”

  “What flavour chips would madam like with her liverwurst?”

  We drive in silence. When we pass the graveyard Doug glances at me. “How was it, seeing that photograph?”

  I shrug. “Maybe it would be different if I knew I was Theresa. But how am I ever going to know?”

  “You can know you’re not her.”

  “If I find her? That’s true, but where do I start? Someone thought they might have gone to Winnipeg. Thirty years ago.”

  “From what you told me, it should be possible to get the mother’s maiden name. If Lisa and Daniel Laboucan got married in White-court it’ll be in the registry there. She may have family in the area still. Shall I see what I can find out?”

  The gravel parking lot is empty, the wind scouring and cold. Doug parks the jeep so we’re looking out across the saddle of alpine tundra.

  Cloud shadows race each other across the slopes. Vast and supine, the foothills spread as far as you can see in either direction. Jagged peaks stand guard over the horizon, clad in their perpetual white. Down here, snow shelters under the skirts of wind-shrunk spruce. I can see the lip of the hollow where the glacier lilies grow in July but the water is invisible, an eye staring straight up at the sky. I shiver.

  Doug notices. He doesn’t ask but I say, “The high mountains, they feel eternal, unchanging. I know they’re not. I know they’re eroding and the glaciers are retreating and all that, but they feel untouchable, above it all. This,”—I wave my hand at the expanse—“I don’t know if I can explain, it’s like the body of a woman, spread out.” I stop, embarrassed.

  “Go on.” Doug’s voice is muffled. He’s staring out, head slightly turned away.

  “It’s the pelt of the Earth, the skin. The forests are like fur. Here, where the trees don’t grow, it’s like the places on an animal’s body where the skin is bare and you can feel the heat.” I stop. It’s easier, talking about it as an animal’s body, but I don’t think I’m the only person who’s uncomfortable here. Maybe he doesn’t like thinking about women’s bodies. A blast of wind rocks the jeep.

  We reach for our sandwiches at the same moment, unwrap them. I tear open the chips and offer some to Doug before embedding a layer in my liverwurst. He watches and smiles but he’s thinking about something else.

  When we’ve licked our fingers and scrunched up the wrappers I ask, “What else did Hubert tell you?”

  “He thinks he’ll be able to sell the store in the spring.”

  “Meaning he thinks it’s going to happen, the new mine?”

  “He figures it wasn’t really the public pushback or even the EIA—the Environmental Impact Assessment—that stopped it before, it was because the price of coal dropped. Now China’s gearing up to make a lot of steel, price’s going back up. I thought once we had an EIA that showed what a rare habitat this is, what damage would be done to species at risk, I thought that would be enough. We could all agree there are places too pristine to trash.”

  “But no?”

  “The valley they want to destroy is right in a grizzly migration route. So they’re offering a Carnivore Compensation Package.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I was. Want to get out, walk around a bit?”

  I don’t, especially, but he looks so bleak I shrug on my jacket. The wind snatches the door of the Jeep from my hand, smashes it against the frame. I fumble in my pocket for my toque. We walk together to an outsized cairn of stone and concrete.

  “This is new,” I say but the wind tears the words from my lips. There are bronze plaques embedded in the sides. Ones at eye level have letters cast in the metal. At hand height they’re in braille.

  Doug leans close to my ear. “They tried painted signs first. Wind and grit sanded the letters right off.”

  My eyes are watering too much to read. I move around so the wind’s at my back.

  The Cardinal Divide is home to the woolly lousewort, Pedicularis lanata, common west of the Rocky Mountains but extremely rare to the east.

  I look up. Doug is staring north, hands in his jacket pockets, hair streaming. Clouds chase each other across the washed blue sky.

  Eventually he turns, looks at me. His eyes are watering. When I get closer I see he’s crying. I walk up, slip my hand in his pocket. His fingers close over mine.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says. He keeps hold of my hand, wipes his eyes with his other sleeve.

  ‘I could love you,’ I think, walking back to the jeep, side by side, heads bent. Which is just great, given that you’re gay and for all I know you have a partner at home. But in some weird way it doesn’t matter.

  “Ready to head back?”

  I nod. He’s concentrating on the rutted road so I can study his profile. He’s told me a lot about himself today but there’s a big fat piece missing. Even if he only realized he was gay after Tanya, when he talked about his brother, wouldn’t there have been some mention there? But I guess if telling his brother to tone it down came out of how deeply closeted and ashamed he was himself ...

  Doug glances at me. I look away quickly. “So you came here as a child?”

  “Every summer when I was growing up. Memorable in part for the fact that we got store-bought lunch. It’s my father’s favourite place. In fact, he was planning to die here.”

  I tell Doug about Mum and Dad’s plan.

  Doug’s laughing, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t laugh but the garlic sausage ... I’d really like to meet him.”

  “
Now?”

  He glances at the clock on the dash. It’s only 1:30.

  “Why not? My neighbour’s coming to ride her horse this afternoon. She’ll feed and water both of them. Do you need to call your father?”

  “Dad’s used to me showing up. Though if I did call ahead the brothers might make us some supper too. The not-brothers.” I glance at Doug. He’s grinning, eco-sorrow at bay for the moment. I like how he doesn’t get stuck.

  Then he looks down at his faded jeans. “Am I ...?”

  “You look fine. I can guarantee Dad’s pants will be older.”

  Chapter Sixty Seven

  “SORRY WE’RE SO late. We had a flat tire.”

  “In the middle of a mud puddle,” Doug says.

  “Come in, come in.” Dad’s wearing a crisp white shirt with a light check of orange and blue lines I’ve never seen before and a brand new pair of canvas pants.

  “Dad, this is Doug Fletcher. Doug, meet my father, Ben Coop-worth.”

  Doug wipes his hands on the sides of his jeans, smearing the mud further. He’s wearing the darned blue socks and a red flannel shirt that’s faded almost to pink.

  “I’ll give Victor and Manfred a jingle.”

  I’ve never heard Dad sound so British. Doug’s still standing in the middle of the room when Dad hangs up. All he said was, “They’re here.”

  “What will you have? I’m afraid we don’t have any beer.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” I say but before I’ve even filled it there’s a knock on the front door.

  “Chicken soup with dumplings,” Victor announces, holding the orange enamelled casserole out in front of him with both hands.

  “And roasted root vegetables with preserved lemon,” Manfred says, waving a covered dish.

  They proceed through the living room, Doug looking faintly bemused.

  When the soup’s on the stove they shake hands with him in turn then we all stand there.

 

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